The Rosie and Roula Show

96: What’s Your Favorite Food? The One That Ignites Memories and Awakens Your Senses

• Roula Abou Haidar and Rosie Burrows

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"Tell Me What You Eat…" 

In this episode, Rosie and Roula dive into something we all have strong feelings about : food. Not just eating it, but remembering it, sharing it, and passing it down. 

From zaatar-smeared manoushe eaten daily on the way to school, to lamb souvlaki tied to memories of love and loss, this episode is a reminder that food is never just fuel — it’s culture, history, family, identity, and joy. 

The conversation covers: 

The foods that shaped them (and still do) 

How immigrant kitchens bridge worlds 

What it means to cook for someone with care 

And a few genius gift-giving tips that go beyond bouquets 

There’s laughter, nostalgia, a little hunger, and an open invitation to you — the listener — to share your own treasured recipe. 

This episode is for anyone who’s ever felt fed in more ways than one by a simple home-cooked meal. 

 

Takeaways 

  • Roula's favorite food is manouche, a Lebanese dish. 
  • Food can evoke strong memories and cultural connections. 
  • Rosie's favorite food is lamb souvlaki, tied to family traditions. 
  • Sharing recipes can create community and connection. 
  • Manouche is versatile and can be adapted for different diets. 
  • Culinary experiences can bridge cultural gaps. 
  • Food is often a source of happiness and comfort. 
  • Both hosts encourage listeners to share their favorite recipes. 
  • Lebanese and Mediterranean cuisines have many similarities. 
  • Personalized gifts, like food baskets, can be more meaningful than flowers. 


Keywords 

favorite food, cultural cuisine, recipes, Lebanese food, Surinamese food, Mediterranean food, food memories, cooking tips, family recipes, food conversations 


  

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Rosie (00:00)
Hmm.

Roula

Roula (00:02)
Yeah.

Rosie (00:03)
What's your favourite food?

Roula (00:06)
Wow, I can only name one.

Rosie (00:11)
So, no, there's no rules here. I'll give you some freedom.

Roula (00:28)
My favorite food. Okay, there's this thing that I eat all my life. I ate it every single day going to school. I came to the Netherlands, I missed it like hell. And now not only I eat it every day, my kids also eat it every day. And that is something we call manouche or zaatar sandwich.

Rosie (00:39)
Mmm.

I love that. What is it?

Bye.

Roula (00:59)
Okay, so manoushe is a Lebanese pizza. It's a pizza dough. It's topped with zaatar. Zaatar is dry thyme, ⁓ roasted sesame seeds, sumac, salt, and oregano. Oregano? Oregano in English? Basil? Oregano. These five ingredients make the zaatar. I could go and grab it to show it actually. It makes the zaatar.

Rosie (01:15)
Mm-mm. Oregano, yeah.

Roula (01:29)
and then you put it in a small bowl you top it with olive oil you make it it becomes like like gooey like slime

Rosie (01:32)
Hmm.

Yeah, bit of a

paste maybe?

Roula (01:41)
yeah yeah yeah a bit of a paste slimy and then you spread it on the dough after you spread it on the dough you put it in the oven to become crispy or soft whatever you like it and when i don't have dough we spread it on a Lebanese wrap bread or we put the bread in the toaster and then we eat it i generally eat it with tomato cucumber and fresh mint

Rosie (01:41)
bit slimier. Okay.

Mmmmm

Mmm.

Yum.

⁓ yum!

Roula (02:13)
this is my favorite food it's my kids favorite food it became my husband's favorite food and everyone who visiting me eats it even liam had a lunch brunch at school and he said to me mom can you please make this manoushe because i talk about it a lot and my friends don't know what i'm talking about i made two big ones cut them in pieces and he said mom everything is gone

Rosie (02:29)
Mmm.

Mm.

Roula (02:44)
They ate them all. What's with this meal? Everyone likes it.

Rosie (02:50)
It sounds delicious!

Like it doesn't sound complicated but it sounds delicious. Sounds like my kind of thing. Yeah. Mmm.

Roula (02:56)
Yes.

And that's by far my all-time everlasting favorite thing to eat.

Rosie (03:07)
Wow. Yum. Every day.

Roula (03:09)
every day, twice a day

sometimes.

Rosie (03:13)
I need you to send me the recipe. Will you share or is this like a secret family recipe? ⁓ thank you. I'll have to see if I can make a gluten-free dough that tastes okay. That's the challenge, but the spices will be the same. We'll talk about it. Okay. Off air, top secret.

Roula (03:18)
I will share this recipe, I will share it, yes.

We'll talk about this for the gluten free. Yeah. It's

it's very vegetarian. It's vegan. It's it fits every diet. It's halal. It fits every diet.

Rosie (03:41)
Love that.

You could probably change the toppings you put on it, or is that breaking the rules a bit? No, no! Against etiquette there.

Roula (03:48)
no no no what my mom used to do she

would add ⁓ she would chop onions red onions and she would chop the tomato very small like one small tomato one cherry tomato and put it in the paste and spread it as a as a on the dough and that's the only variation because if you want to do another variation there are but it won't involve any of the zaatar it's going to be something totally different

Rosie (03:56)
Yes, yum.

Hmm.

Roula (04:18)
and it will still be called Man'oushe.

Rosie (04:22)
I am I'm excited to try this so don't forget to share the recipe. I wish I had such a similar story. I don't. Do I have to pick a favorite food? Is it my turn now or? ⁓ food for me is so tied to memories. So I would say I love Mediterranean food. ⁓ My favorite.

Roula (04:37)
Yeah, you do. Of course you have to.

Rosie (04:53)
For now, in my mood right now, I would say my favorite food is probably lamb souvlaki. So it's marinated souvlaki. So it's a Greek dish. It's usually like chunks of lamb put on a skewer. ⁓ You can barbecue it or chuck it in the oven. And I usually have it with white rice, tzatziki, lemon, garlic. so good. Pita bread, just simple.

Roula (04:58)
What is that? LAMPSOF?

That's so good!

Rosie (05:21)
And mum loved it. used to make it for her. ⁓ just on occasion, like for her 60th birthday, we had a huge group of people around and I made lambs of luckier for everybody. And when she was sick, we snuck her out of the aged care home and took her to the house and we made lambs of luckier. So it's, there's memories tied to it. And dad loved that food too. And it was mum that introduced him to that sort of food because prior to that.

He was more into pies. Only Vegemite! No!

Roula (05:51)
He only ate Vegemite.

Rosie (05:56)
probably part of the diet, but you know pies and that's pastries that sort of thing. down under. yeah, that kind of food has good memories. Definitely. That's a yummy one. And now I want it. I actually don't eat lamb much because it's quite expensive. It's one of the more expensive cuts of meat here.

Roula (05:58)
I come from the land down under

Hmm

Yeah, I don't eat lamb much because it tastes so strong.

Rosie (06:17)
Mm.

It is strong, that's true, it is. It's probably not something I'd want to eat all the time. But it's yummy! Mmm.

Roula (06:27)
crazy. Okay,

over the years, over the years, of course, I met new people, different cultures, different kind of food. And the most astonishing thing is that I love from Java, the island of Java. So my husband, his Dutch is born here, but his

family is from Indonesia, from Java Island, but they were born in Suriname and then they immigrated to the Netherlands when they were young people. So his culture is a lot of Suriname food on the Javan's way.

Rosie (06:55)
Mmmmm

Roula (07:15)
and it's so good, it's so good. So in our house we have favorite food. When we feel not inspired, don't know what to cook, I either make something Lebanese or I make something Surinamese or we buy it Surinamese because it's popular here. And these kind of food is our happiness. They're truly our happiness. They make us so happy. And then in the Javanese there is saoto soup. ⁓

Rosie (07:17)
Mmm.

Mmm.

Yeah. ⁓

Roula (07:44)
goodness, we can eat sou the soup forever. And it's something also we all like, which is chicken soup with some spices and a lot of spices. It's not spicy, but it has a lot of natural spice flavor, a lot of flavor. And this is this is like cultural introduction. Also, when I invite white people or people of color that are not from Suriname, never heard of it. I cook this to them, too.

Rosie (07:57)
flavor. Yeah.

I haven't.

Roula (08:14)
So Lebanese people, cook for them the saoto soup and the other kind of people, cook for them the manouche, the Lebanese food. ⁓ Yeah, everybody likes them. They are a good experience. They trigger conversations. And these are my two favorite things to eat.

Rosie (08:29)
They do.

I love that. I want to try both of them. I'm coming to your house and I'm bringing flowers without a vase. What are you going to do about it?

Roula (08:38)
Yeah, come to my

When I know you're coming, I'll have a vase ready on the countertop.

Rosie (08:50)
Smarty pants. You had to have an answer, didn't you?

Roula (08:55)
you know, about talking about flowers, I visited ⁓ friends for the first time a few days ago and they renovated their house. No, not the first time. The first time after they renovated their house. And I don't know what their colors, what the decor, what they like. What I did is I bought a small, nice basket and a basket that they can use for anything, for toys, for napkins, anything. So a useful basket. And I put in a basket ⁓

Rosie (08:55)
food.

Mmm. ⁓

Roula (09:24)
dry fruit to make gin. I know they like gin. So it has a bottle. The bottle only had the dry ingredient to make nice... no, was a strawberry mojito.

Rosie (09:27)
Mmm.

Ooh.

Roula (09:37)
and what the other thing yeah a candle citronella because now it's nice weather everyone's sitting outside a citronella candle and some other small thing so the budget was almost equal to a flower bouquet i didn't go over the budget but it wasn't flowers and i liked it because one time when someone visited me she also got me a basket and it was full of some

Rosie (09:53)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Roula (10:06)
candles and blanket and I still use them. I love them.

Rosie (10:09)
It's more personal and it's practical

and yes, flowers just die. They're pretty but then they're not.

Roula (10:16)
Yeah.

Yes, they die. They're pretty to look at. then, yeah. this is so out of topic from favorite food to my tip for gifting someone.

Rosie (10:23)
then they die.

Mmm, mmm,

food. Mmm, mmm, love food. We need to share some recipes. I need to send you like my Greek lemon chicken recipe. So good.

Roula (10:41)
Please do so because we love to this kind of food. I mean Greek foods resemble Lebanese. Greece, Turkey, and Lebanese, they're similar. But the Lebanese give it a better taste. So whatever you eat in Lebanon is much better.

Rosie (10:48)
Yeah, there's similarities, isn't there?

I need you to make me some Lebanese food. Mm! Recipes please! Woof woof woof woof woof! My dinner's gonna be boring now. What do I have in the fridge? A steak. That's a bit plain and ordinary, isn't it? Yeah. ⁓

Roula (10:59)
you

Mm.

I don't know what I have. Yesterday we made fish on the barbecue and ⁓ rice, salad. We did, what we did also? Baba ganoush, you know what baba ganoush is?

Rosie (11:18)
Boom. ⁓

⁓ yum! Yes, I do.

Mum used to make that. So yummy. Mmm.

Roula (11:32)
⁓ yes, so

we had like a festive dinner yesterday just because it was nice weather and yeah just because.

Rosie (11:37)
Just cuz. Yeah. I love that.

Roula (11:43)
So that's that was our talk about food. Yum yum. All right. I really would love to hear. Well, you will send me a recipe. But how about the listener share with us one recipe that they really want us to try?

Rosie (11:58)
Yes!

Please, I would love that. Send us your favourite recipe. Yes. ⁓ That's an amazing idea. Someone needs to send a recipe in stat. Get on with it. Let's go. All right, catching the next one.

Roula (12:02)
So we both make it and we say, describe it.

Cool.

Let's go.

Bye.